Yatra.com focuses on hotel and holiday business

SummaryYatra.com is now looking at introducing apps for tablets and Windows software mobile phones.

Yatra.com is aggressively focusing on increasing its hotel bookings and driving its holiday packages this year. Until last year the company had about 6,000 bookable hotel inventory. Presently this inventory has been increased to 14,000 hotels in over 500 cities in India and about three lakh hotels internationally. Speaking exclusively to Financial Express Online, Sharat Dhall, president, Yatra.com said, “The appetite among travellers to do hotel bookings online has increased significantly and we have been increasing our inventory seeing the growth potential in this segment. We have seen over 200 per cent growth year-on-year in this segment.” Apart from the hotel segment, Yatra.com is also significantly investing into introducing new products for mobiles. “We launched applications for Android and iOS platform in the last quarter of 2013. And we are now looking at introducing apps for tablets and Windows software mobile phones. For 2014, the focus of the company is going to be holiday packages and hotel bookings.”

Elaborating on the market trends, Dhall opined, “In the short haul travel space, Thailand has taken a slight beating due to the political scenario, and the focus has shifted to Singapore and Dubai. Domestic tourism has also been on a steady rise. Last year though travel to long haul destinations took a dip, with the rupee maintaining its position of about approximately INR 62 per US$, travellers have now accepted the change. Having said that, our Europe destination bookings have been good and destinations like Australia and New Zealand are seen picking up.” With 2014 likely to witness the start of new carriers in the Indian market, Dhall is optimistic that this will stimulate the travel growth which in turn will benefit domestic tourism growth as well.

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